Director of Quality & Release Engineering

Who you are

• Proven track record leading a QA or quality engineering function of significant scale — including embedded domain leads and direct management of practitioners
• Has directly managed engineers building tooling or automation infrastructure — not just managed QA practitioners executing test plans
• Has delivered a meaningful QA transformation: AI adoption, automation maturity uplift, defect governance overhaul, or similar
• Has worked in a multi-client or multi-product platform environment, managing quality outcomes across concurrent delivery streams
• Has owned release governance in a complex, multi-stream delivery context — including go/no-go accountability
• Exposure to energy, utilities, billing, or similarly regulated complex domains is a plus — not essential
• Strong grounding in test strategy, automation frameworks, and CI/CD integration — sufficient to credibly lead engineers building these things
• Working knowledge of LLMs and AI tooling in a QA context: test generation, defect triage, coverage analysis, synthetic test data
• Understands test data management principles and the challenges of environment data integrity at scale
• Able to evaluate build vs. buy for tooling; assess AI testing platforms with appropriate scepticism
• Comfortable setting strategy and being accountable for outcomes — not just owning process
• Able to operate at programme level with senior engineering and product stakeholders
• Experienced in leading distributed, multi-timezone quality functions
• Strong communicator — translates quality metrics into business outcomes; can make the case for investment in tooling and governance
• Demonstrated experience leading practice transformation in an engineering context
• Able to bring people with them through transitions that challenge established ways of working
• Comfortable with ambiguity; can hold direction steady while the detail is still being worked out
• Familiar with observability, production monitoring, and shift-right quality practices
• We understand some people may not apply for jobs unless they tick every box. But if you're excited about joining us and think you have some of what we're looking for, even if you're not 100% sure, we'd still love to hear from you

What the job involves

• Team: Quality & Release
• Level: Director
• The quality engineering function is shifting from manual oversight and process governance toward an AI-assisted product development lifecycle where QA leads its own domain test strategy and bespoke tooling drives automation maturity
• This role will drive this shift in our organization and ways of working
• You will own quality and release governance at programme level, directly manage an engineering team building AI-assisted automation and test data capability, and set the standard that QA leads across delivery streams work to
• You will be as comfortable driving change as you are accountable for outcomes
• Responsibilities will include:
• Strategic Quality Leadership
• Own and evolve the quality strategy across delivery streams, aligned to programme objectives and client SLAs
• Define and maintain release governance frameworks — release readiness criteria, risk acceptance, and sign-off authorities
• Set quality standards and coverage expectations; ensure QA leads translate these into domain-level test strategies
• Drive defect governance at programme level — internal and client-facing SLA compliance
• Represent quality and risk in senior leadership, architecture, and product forums
• AI-Driven Tooling & Automation
• Directly manage a team of engineers building and maintaining bespoke automation tooling, leveraging AI and LLM capabilities
• Own the test data management strategy — including AI-assisted synthetic data generation and environment data integrity
• Evaluate and select off-the-shelf AI testing tools; define governance frameworks for their use and validation
• Ensure governance gates are maintained as AI participation in the PDLC grows — accountable humans must remain in the loop for risk acceptance and production judgement
• Establish tooling standards that QA leads can adopt across domains without creating dependency on a central bottleneck
• QA Function Leadership & Operating Model
• Lead, develop, and performance-manage QA leads embedded across domains; define the operating model and career framework for the function
• Own the accountability split clearly: QA leads own test strategy and tooling choices for their domain; this role owns the standard they work to
• Drive consistency across streams without becoming a handoff point — enable QA leads to move fast within well-defined guardrails
• Build a quality engineering culture — not a bug-finding one
• Change Management & Adoption
• Lead the transformation of QA practice from script maintenance to intelligent, risk-based, AI-assisted quality engineering
• Drive upskilling across the function — building capability in AI tooling, context engineering, and agent-assisted workflows
• Manage resistance and build confidence in new ways of working; bring the team through change without losing them
• Communicate quality outcomes in business terms to senior stakeholders — escaped defect rates, release stability, risk posture
• Release Management
• Own the release quality process end-to-end: environment strategy, regression coverage, go/no-go decisions, and post-release monitoring
• Embed shift-left practices — quality gates early in the PDLC, not just at release
• Manage the tension between delivery velocity and release stability, particularly as AI-generated code volumes increase

Benefits

• Progressive leave policies - including leave dedicated to the moments that matter to you the most
• Annual discretionary bonus
• Dedicated personal learning and home office budgets
• Flexible working — we trust you to work in a way that suits your lifestyle
• 26 days holiday
• Kaluza Share Scheme